The Supervillain Reader

INTRODUCTION

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE VILLAIN!

ROBERT G. WEINER, ROBERT MOSES PEASLEE, AND DUNCAN PRETTYMAN

I don’t need a teacher. I need an enemy. The greatest villains have always been defined by the [people] who try and stop them.

THE RIDDLER, GOTHAM TELEVISION SERIES

LITERARY AND FILMIC SUPERVILLAINS HAVE BECOME AN INTEGRAL PART OF popular consciousness. Grendel, Darth Vader, Snidely Whiplash, Sauron, Blofeld, Dracula, Lady Macbeth, Long John Silver, Bluto, Sweeney Todd, Uriah Heep, Edward Hyde, Fu Manchu, Fantomas, Moriarty—all of these characters and many more have become to varying degrees as important to our understanding of what makes up human nature and evil as any religious text. Today, the villain is newly ubiquitous in popular culture; this villainous turn is chief among the reasons this collection has been produced. While we should be careful about assigning to this trend any undue novelty (toys featuring supervillains go back several decades, after all, including plastic models of figures like the Joker, the Riddler, the Green Goblin, the Lizard, and Doctor Doom), it seems apparent to anyone paying attention that, as Heath Ledger’s Joker suggests, things have changed.

In some cases, villain toys, puzzles, games, and video games provide a way for children (and adults) to live vicariously as the bad guy while, hopefully, keeping their moral compasses intact. Villains can be used to teach children traditional human values, like sharing and helping others, as they are in books like DC Superheroes: My First Book of Super-Villains—Lex Luthor is selfish, while Superman is caring; the Joker plays tricks on everyone, while Batman wants to keep them safe.¹ Superheroes are to be held up as exemplars of good decision making while villains are not (fig. 1).

But supervillains are by no means featured today only as straw men or negative examples; readers and viewers have for some time been invited to revel in the bad guys’ beguiling sociopathy and sympathize with their plight. As early as 1976, Simon and Schuster published a collection of stories recounting the origins of Marvel villains called Bring On the Bad Guys, featuring Loki, Mephisto, Dormammu, the Red Skull, the Green Goblin, Doctor Doom, and the Abomination. Stan Lee’s introduction to the 1998 revised edition of that volume is characteristic of his inimitable voice and one of the early indicators of contemporary trends in popular culture storytelling:

Figure 1. A tool for teaching young children that superheroes do what is right (from Katz and Katz, DC Super Heroes: My First Book of Super-Villains, 2014).

The viler the villain, the more heroic the hero!

Think about it. Would David have seemed so heroic battling Goliath if Goliath had been a five-foot-tall accountant? Would legend have paid homage to the battle between Ulysses and Cyclops if Cyclops had merely been a mild-mannered optician? Would you have thrilled to the exploits of Robin Hood quite as much if the Sheriff of Nottingham had been a charitable official famed for his kindness and charity?

Now let’s take some examples that are closer to home …

Would loyal readers have followed the exploits of the Fantastic Four all these years if their arch-enemy, Dr. Victor von Doom, was a beloved Bavarian pediatrician? And what about SpiderMan? How exciting would his adventures have been if Carnage was a gentle, fun-loving philanthropist whose greatest pleasure was helping those who were less fortunate than he? Take the mighty Thor. Imagine how excited you’d be about his battles with Loki if Loki was a sensitive and caring brother who spent his time writing poetry and wrapping bandages for the Asgardian branch of the Red Cross!²

That Lee had the foresight to publish this collection long before the deluge of villain-centric media being produced today speaks to just how powerful these characters are and to the rich conceptual value of villainy. Two decades later, Marvel published a sequel titled Bring Back the Bad Guys,³ and Stan Lee edited a volume of prose stories featuring Marvel villains called The Ultimate Super-Villains.⁴ DC has also recently published a number of volumes bringing their villains front and center, including Forever Evil, Villains United, DC Comics Super-Villains: The Complete Visual History, and several volumes featuring the Secret Society of Super Villains.⁵ There are many more volumes featuring specific villains like the Joker, Doctor Doom, the Green Goblin, the Kingpin, Galactus, Thanos, the Riddler, Two-Face, Lex Luthor, and Magneto. Supervillains and Philosophy and The Science of Supervillains are popular academic works.⁶ There are also tongue-in-cheek handbooks on villainy,⁷ and one should not miss Jon Morris’s The Legion of Regrettable Supervillains: Oddball Criminals from Comic Book History. Morris catalogues the most bizarre supervillains from sequential art, including Brickbat (who throws poison bricks) and the Jingler, who uses poetry to kill and the blood of his victim as ink. Other oddball villains have names like Balloon Maker, the Roach Wrangler, the Human Flying Fish, and the Seaweed Queen.⁸

One reason that villains are so compelling to contemporary audiences may be that, as Peter Coogan suggests, villains are proactive while heroes are reactive.⁹ The villain presents freedom of choice and free will, while the hero represents repression and the stable order of things. Ryan Litsey, writing in this volume on the Kingpin and earlier on the Joker,¹⁰ suggests that not only are villains attractive as cathartic proxies for the reader; they may present a reader’s most authentic possible point of reference. Such ruminations on the attraction of mavericks, rule breakers, and narcissists take on new urgency and relevance in the current era of populism heralded by the 2016 election of US president Donald Trump, a candidate who subscribed to winning as an ethos rather than that nonsense about great power and great responsibility—a candidate marked not by traditionally heroic ideals of sacrifice, piety, and commitment to social order but by traditionally deviant ideals of compulsive acquisition, irreverence, and disruption of the status quo. While the latter qualities have been enjoyable in fictional characters for generations, their presence in a viable candidate for—and, of course, winner of—the highest office in the land is a new and urgent development. We feel that this volume, then, may contribute to our understanding of such social phenomena, if only obliquely.

THE CHARACTERIZATION OF EVIL

Villains have a long history in the narrative and folklore of humanity: Ishtar from the Epic of Gilgamesh, Kali the Hindu goddess of death, the demonic Rolangs in Tibetan culture, Hera and Cronos in Greek mythology, Pluto from the Roman tradition, the trickster in some Norse and Native American stories, Set in the Egyptian tradition, and Gaunab and Ardo from African traditions. Perhaps the most recognizable example in the Western tradition is Satan, featured in the biblical story of Adam and Eve from the book of Genesis, taking the form of a serpent who temps Eve with the apple as a means to gain divine knowledge. According to some interpretations of Isaiah 14:9–22, Satan’s greatest crime was being prideful and thinking himself equal to God; this of course leads to his expulsion from heaven to Sheol (Hades/Hell/the Underworld/the Place of the Dead), to endure eternal damnation and harvest the souls of the ungodly. The Koran, in The Heights, 7:11–18, makes a similar mention of Satan’s pride. Satan refuses to prostrate before Adam when commanded to do so by God:

Why did you not prostrate yourself when I commanded you? He asked. I am nobler than he, he replied. You created me out of fire, but You created him of Clay. He said: Off with you hence! There is no place for your contemptuous pride. Away with you! Henceforth you shall be humble.¹¹

Certainly, with the advent of Christianity and stories of Satan tempting Jesus in the book of Matthew and the Great Beast in the book of Revelation (not to mention Satan’s attempt to destroy Job in the Old Testament), Satan is presented as the author of all evil in the world, acting with assistance from demons to tempt the faithful into sin and wickedness. The apocryphal literature did much to ensure that this idea was propagated. For example, in the book of Infancy, which tells the story of Jesus’s early years, Satan is consistently a thorn in Jesus’s side, always trying to hurt him in some way—he even possesses a young Judas Iscariot.¹²

Satan, however, has experienced a popular culture rehabilitation. The television show Lucifer (2016–) has turned the Devil into nothing less than a hero. Based on Neil Gaiman, Sam Kieth, and Mike Dringenberg’s version of Satan in the DC Comics series The Sandman (first appearing in The Sandman, no. 4 [1989]), the Fox adaptation portrays the character as prideful and sexually promiscuous, but also as a punisher of evil. This likely strikes the mainstream television viewer as novel, but the Devil has enjoyed a robust representation in comics for some time. While not always positioned theologically as Jewish, Christian, or Islamic in nature, Satan’s various iterations consistently feature him harvesting souls and employing minions to do his bidding. For example, Marvel’s (or Timely Comics’) original Golden Age Black Widow is employed by Satan to kill evildoers so that their souls can enter Hell and nourish Satan’s never-ending hunger for them.¹³ In 2015, as part of his Chilling Archives of Horror series, comics historian Craig Yoe published Devil Tales, featuring stories of old Scratch from the pre–Comics Code days (and featuring the work of artists like Don Heck, Gene Colon, and Dick Ayers).¹⁴ There are Satan-like characters scattered through the respective universes of Marvel and DC, and others who live in the underworld: Marvel has Mephisto, Blackheart, Zarathos, and occasionally even Satan himself (one of Marvel’s most famous supernatural characters is the Son of Satan, Daimon Hellstrom); DC has its own versions of Satan (and characters like Neron and the Blue Devil); and Image Comics in their Spawn universe also deploys a version of Satan and the character Malebolgia.¹⁵

Satan’s influence on popular culture storytelling forms is well articulated in one particular sequential art example: 2011’s Fear Itself: Ghost Rider. Here, former Ghost Rider Johnny Blaze and Mephisto dialogue about the nature of evil and sin. In this iteration, Blaze has given up being the Ghost Rider, and the mantle has been taken up by a young female. The story revolves around the first human, Adam, who brought sin into the world. Adam and his followers are using the Ghost Rider to wipe away all sin and make the world a godlier place. All is not what it seems, however; once the Ghost Rider wipes the sin out of someone, that person is reduced to a mindless zombie. Responding to Blaze, Mephisto suggests: Sin may be a bad. But it’s also part of what makes humanity. It’s inherent in your flaws and foibles, your desires, your drives. Without these things, you have no creativity. No goals or ‘Demons’ to overcome. No urge to improve as individuals. This cold emotionless existence is what happens if Adam takes the sin away from humanity.¹⁶ Blaze is not convinced, however, and believes that Mephisto has a more sinister idea in mind (fig. 2). Stan Lee had Satan in mind when he introduced Mephisto in Silver Surfer, no. 3 (1968), but he didn’t want to hit the reader over the head with religious implications.¹⁷ He had wanted to create a villain who was the most universally recognized symbol of evil on the face of the earth—the specter of Satan.¹⁸ Mephisto attempts to pervert and destroy the Silver Surfer, whom Lee saw as an allegorical representation of all that is good, all that is pure and unsullied in the human condition…. His total selflessness, and loathing of violence, greed, and deceit seem to place him on par with the greatest heroes in the annuals of religious legend.¹⁹

This characterization of Satan is some distance from classic representations of evil. Nathan Alan Breen’s analysis of demonic characters in Old English poetry shows how the protagonists’ demonic opponents were shown to be inferior to the subjects in various ways (such as knowledge and agency).²⁰ Breen points out that showing demonic characters as inferior was a form of othering that distanced them from readers and subjects, which in turn reduced feelings of empathy and/or pity. Part of the reason that this distance was created was so that when subjects (heroes) use their opponents’ (villains’) methods against them, readers do not consider the subjects’ use of such methods evil. For example, when superheroes use violence to stop supervillains in comic books, readers do not consider the superheroes’ acts evil. The reason for this is twofold. First, by othering the villain, the author ensures that audiences don’t feel bad or pity them when bad things happen to them; and, second, because the violence is being used against an other, audiences do not generally consider it a negative mark against the superhero. What normally would be considered an evil act (using violence against another human/sentient being) is in this case not considered evil; in fact, it may be lauded as good, righteous, or just. In an analysis of justice paradigms in comic books, Nickie Phillips and Staci Strobl argue that the dominant paradigm is vigilantism, in which moral justice trumps legitimate criminal procedure.²¹ The reason that this paradigm dominates comic books (or at least superhero comics) is its appeal to a retributive view of justice popular in the United States. Thus, the irony of comic books as a revenge fantasy is that evil is employed against evil in hopes of giving birth to good, a uniquely Judeo-Christian notion of apocalyptic redemption.²² Unfortunately, the irony of comic books is not limited to comic books, or even US culture. Examples of the irony of comic books can be seen in other media from other cultures around the world.

Figure 2. The Satan-like Mephisto tells Johnny Blaze that sin is a necessary part of humanity; without sin, we lose an important part of who we are as humans (from Williams, Clark, Ching, et al., Fear Itself: Ghost Rider, 2011).

For example, in the story of Shuten Dōji from medieval Japan, the titular evil demon welcomes the heroes, disguised as priests, who have come to kill him, into his fortress.²³ Shuten Dōji is shown to be a generous and trusting host; however, these qualities are ultimately his downfall, as the heroes use their subterfuge to slay him while he sleeps. Here, we are expected to praise the heroes for their cleverness and use of deception and lies to kill the demon, who had acted generously. This example illustrates how, by othering the villain, we can justify the acts of the heroes, even if we would normally condemn such actions. This process of othering the villain or villainizing the other is central to the concept of the villain and is rooted deep within the human experience.

According to Jens Kjeldgaard-Christiansen, evil, and consequently the villain, serve evolutionary purposes for the human psyche: evil is an agentic designation reserved for a marked, sustained mismatch between the expected welfare tradeoffs of others toward us and our groups—be it real or imagined.²⁴ In other words, evil does not exist and is only a convenient label for competing interests or world views. In fact, many characteristics of villains, such as foreign accents or disgusting appearances, help to make othering them even easier. Thus, when we can simply justify a person’s action as evil, we do not consider what may have caused that person to act the way he or she did, often justifying draconian punishment against the other.²⁵ The contemporary reengagement with Satan is perhaps symptomatic of a new generation coming to terms with this perspectival nature of evil.

NARRATOLOGY AND THE SUPERVILLAIN

Discussing the Joker, Janet Pate argues that every superhero must have a supervillain to exercise his brain and muscle power and keep him on his toes.²⁶ It is often a matter of being two sides of the same coin, or matched opposites: Batman/Joker, Reed Richards/Doctor Doom, the Flash/Reverse Flash, Wonder Woman/Cheetah, Iron Man/Mandarin, and so on. As the Mandarin tells Tony Stark (Iron Man): We are linked you and I. By the strands of FATE. We are Yin and Yang, East and West, Black Science and Mystic Purity. The Living and the Dying (fig. 3).²⁷

This duality of actant and reactant is an important dimension of the superhero/supervillain narrative, one explored in detail by the discipline of narratology. In Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, Mieke Bal defines narratology as the theory of narratives, the goal of which is to deconstruct its subjects for deep analysis. Narratology as a project seeks to provide a vocabulary for describing any given narrative text, which Bal defines as a text in which an agent relates (‘tells’) a story in a particular medium,²⁸ including anything from books to movies. A story is a presented within a fabula, which Bal defines as a series of logically and chronologically related events that are caused or experienced by actors.²⁹ Actors are simply agents that perform actions, and events are transitions from one state to another.³⁰ Thus, Bal suggests, agents tell stories, which are presented as fabula within which actors perform actions in order to cause or experience events, which are transitions from one state to another. Narratologists distinguish between three different layers of analysis—(narrative) text, story, and (fabula) elements—each of which is made up of several particular topics that distinguish one layer from the others.

Figure 3. The supervillain is often the matched opposite of the superhero, as the Mandarin tells Tony Stark’s Iron Man (from Benson, Kaminski, Abnett, et al., Iron Man/War Machine: Hands of the Mandarin, 2013).

The first topic of importance in the present discussion is the narrator. The narrator is part of the text layer and is defined as a fictitious spokesman who ‘utters’ the signs that make up a story.³¹ The narrator may or may not be a character in the story but is always separate from the text’s creator. Narrators can cede control at times to allow characters to speak directly, and they can play important roles in narratological analysis, as will be shown later. Now we turn attention to two important topics in the second layer of analysis, story. The first of these two topics is sequential ordering, simply the relations between events in the story and their chronological sequence in the fabula.³² Narrative texts can obviously have a wide range of different orderings. The second topic is focalization, the relation between the vision and that which is ‘seen,’ perceived.³³ Put another way, focalization is about identifying the lens through which we see a story (its characteristics, etc.) and how it relates to what is seen.

The final layer, elements, contains the topic of classes of actors. These are particularly important to this volume, which is concerned with a particular class of actor, the villain, or, as shall be described below, the opponent. According to Bal, there are six classes of actors, each of which is based on certain shared characteristics of its members. The first two classes of actors are related subjects and objects. A subject is an actor who aspires toward some object, while an object is what the subject aspires toward. For example, Superman wants to defeat Lex Luthor: Lex Luthor would be the object and Superman the subject. The object does not have to be a person, nor does it even have to be material. For example, Indiana Jones wants to find the Holy Grail (material), and Miss America wants world peace (immaterial). The next two classes of actors are also related: power and receiver. Power is that which gives the object. Bal notes that in many cases [power is] not a person but an abstraction: e.g. society, fate, time, human self-centredness, cleverness.³⁴ Thus, power could be something within the subject, like a personal trait, or it may be external to the subject, like a king. A receiver is the person to whom the object is given³⁵—generally the subject is also the receiver but does not have to be. Finally, the last two classes of actors are helpers and opponents. Helpers help the subject get the object; for example, Robin helps Batman defeat the Joker. However, the magic sword that can cut the giant’s chain, or the moonless night that allows the detective to slip into the gangster’s hideout, are also helpers. Opponents, then, hinder the subject from getting the object. Again, the opponent does not have to be an actor. It could be the detective’s alcoholism, or the knight’s fear of snails. Collectively, these six classes can be used to describe all actors in a narrative text.

Throughout history and across genres, authors have used narratological techniques to set apart villains, antagonists, and opponents from other characters in a narrative text. One way that authors and/or narrators do this is to exert a certain amount of control over villains. Villains, while necessary for an interesting story, must be carefully controlled by creators lest they confuse or mislead other characters and/or readers. Creators therefore use a variety of narratological techniques to clearly show that villains are inferior to the hero(es) and should not be listened to. Additionally, showing villains as inferior is another way for creators to other them so that readers do not identify with or pity them, which could lead readers to turn on the hero (who is now seen as a bully).

Breen’s analysis of the representation of demonic characters in Old English poems provides an apt illustration. Breen focuses on how the narrative elements and narrator are used to control demonic characters so that they are ultimately shown as inferior and/or disadvantaged compared to the forces of good, arguing that precise arrangement of the narrative and characters’ speech is needed to control the demonic character.³⁶ In other words, authors carefully choose their words to ensure that demonic character(s) are seen as wrong and bad. Breen suggests that many Old English authors made use of their narrators in this way; through the narrator, the author maintains control of all the characters in the story by selectively deciding when they are allowed to speak directly. This allows the author to remain in control even when allowing demonic characters to offer contradictory utterances. Breen discusses another method for controlling demonic characters, namely limiting or restricting their knowledge and/or agency: they are thus seen as inferior to other characters who possess more knowledge and freedom. Finally, Breen demonstrates how time can be used to create a hierarchy of power among characters: the more clearly and chronologically a character can present a narrative, the more power they have. Thus, demonic characters fail to present coherent narratives and are cast as lacking power. Breen’s analysis shows that villains, at least in Old English poetry, are characterized by a lack of control. They are too dangerous to be given freedom for fear that they will affect the other characters and/or the reader. The idea of control as it relates to villains runs through many narratological accounts of villains, albeit in different forms.

Another way authors set villains apart from other characters is by denying them full control over their desires. Often, villains have the ability to sate all of their desires, and yet they remain unsatisfied. Samuel Toman Rowe argues that in the eighteenth-century novel it is the villain’s desire, not the hero’s, that pushes the narrative forward.³⁷ Rowe labels this idea—that villains are the instigators of the plot but are nevertheless swept up by it involuntarily—the persecutory plot. In his analysis, Rowe demonstrates how the persecutory plot plays out in the stories of four archetypal eighteenth-century villains: (1) the criminal, (2) the rake, (3) the oriental despot, and (4) the gothic villain. The criminal is characterized by tragicomedy, a preoccupation with the proletarian lifestyle, and the demeanor of a picaro, cunning in response to a contingent circumstance.³⁸ The rake is essentially a rapacious playboy, while the oriental despot is an insatiable, capricious, and violent being weltering in sexual and gustatory enjoyments.³⁹ Lastly, the gothic villain is characterized by gothic faciality,⁴⁰ conjuring the idea of readable versus unreadable faces: the insatiable desire of others is focused in the face, thus gothic fiction makes the negativity of [the villain’s] desire visible on his face.⁴¹ What Rowe’s analysis shows is that another characteristic of villains, at least in the eighteenth-century English novel, is insatiability, which puts the plot of the story into motion.

The idea of the villain as the driver of the plot is also seen in another context, that of video games. Here, the villain/antagonist often serves the purpose of not only setting the plot in motion but also establishing the terms of gameplay. Thus, another way that villains can be identified is by looking at which characters instigate the plot of a narrative. In his analysis of video game antagonists, James Neel shows how they have evolved from purely gameplay elements to story elements, ultimately serving both functions.⁴² Neel suggests that antagonists in video games have four primary functions: (1) the antagonist is the primary source of the game’s conflict, (2) the actions of the antagonist define the player’s goals, (3) the antagonist presents players with obstacles to overcome, and (4) the antagonist is the final obstacle, and their defeat resolves the conflict.⁴³ Additionally, Neel notes that video game antagonists are mainly denoted through their characterization. In other words, in video games you can pick out a character as a villain by his or her dialogue and actions. Therefore, another method of identifying villains is to look for who acts as the genesis of a narrative’s action.

No stranger to narrative action, Christian intellectual C. S. Lewis has argued that evil is simply good spoiled, contending that there can be good without evil, but no evil without good. You know what the biologists mean by a parasite—an animal that lives on another animal. Evil is a parasite. It is there only because good is there for it to spoil and confuse.⁴⁴ Lewis saw the human condition and its propensity for heroic acts, but he also understood that humanity has within it those parasitic tendencies for villainy. The villain, for Lewis, is thus one who is unhampered by societal morality, with the free will to do as one pleases without thought to consequences. Mike Alsford suggests that true villainy has to do with the desire to dominate, to subsume the other within the individual self…. The villain would appear to lack empathy, the ability to feel for others, to see themselves as part of a larger whole. The villain uses the world and the people in it from a distance, as pure resource.⁴⁵ This definition covers many aspects of villainy, but it is too boilerplate. As this volume shows, the line between villainy and heroism is often a thin one. For some villains, there can be redemption; a single evil act does not necessarily make one pure evil. For example, in Sam Raimi’s film Spider-Man 3, Uncle Ben dies because he got in the way of Sandman, who was stealing to get money for his daughter’s operation. Uncle Ben was a victim of circumstance. This does not excuse Sandman’s killing of Ben, but it does explain how one can commit an evil act without evil motivations. As Jeff Rovin argues in The Encyclopedia of Super Villains: The truth is, super villains also teach us about ourselves. We may admire the hubris of super villains, identify with their frustrations, and even … find their freedom alluring. But the bottom line is that in life, as in art, herodom is a chronicle of successes while villaindom is a catalogue of failures.⁴⁶

DEFINING SUPERVILLAINS: A SPECTRUM OF IDENTIFICATION

Like their foes, supervillains have origin stories, and this is one of the attributes that sets them apart from average criminals. There are those who arise as a result of a freakish accident (the Joker falling into a vat of chemicals); others who are spurned by a romantic interest, often because of their appearance (the Mole Man or Venom, the latter spurned not by a love interest but by Peter Parker/Spider-Man); and those who are created for a purpose (the Scorpion, created to take down Spider-Man). Others, like Darkseid, are simply forces of nature. But the origin story, while possibly a viable mode of categorization, is not the most useful. In addition to sorting varieties of supervillain, we must also determine what separates the supervillain from the superhero.

They have much in common, after all. In terms of comic studies, however, the defining characteristic is that, historically, the hero does not kill. The boundary for superheroes is often killing, which is generally regarded as a line that superheroes will not cross because it makes them too much like the criminals they fight. Killing also takes the hero from being reactive … to proactive, taking the powers of the jury and judge into their own hands.⁴⁷ Today, even seemingly incorruptible characters like Jim Gordon can cross that line. In the series Gotham, Gordon kills for the Penguin, and he also has no problem taking out evildoers, like mayor Theo Galavan. The Sub-Mariner, the Punisher, Deadpool, and similar characters, while fascinating to watch, are not superheroes in the traditional sense (since they have no compunction about killing), even though their actions may do some good and take out criminals. Spawn kills child-killer Billy Kincaid, who would, no doubt, continue to kidnap and murder children if he were not taken out. But Batman will never kill the Joker (even though the Joker often wants him to), because it would go against his moral code, no matter how many people the Joker murders. Likewise, the Fantastic Four will not kill Doctor Doom, nor will Spider-Man kill any of his rogues’ gallery, no matter how many times these villains try to kill the heroes. This begs the question: are heroes like Batman and Spider-Man at fault for all the serial murders the Joker or Carnage commit? Have they sacrificed lives that could have been saved if they had just crossed that line and eliminated the villains in question? Does that make Batman or Spider-Man less of a hero and more a villain?

As we discussed above, narratology tells us that opposing forces in any story are subjects and opponents, but it is clear that the binary of hero/villain does not map comfortably onto that of subject/opponent. The subject is the actor within the narrative with whom the audience is invited to empathize and experience the action, but that actor need not be heroic. When they are, the opponent is sometimes a true villain, but the heroic actor may also face off against an antivillain (a villain with sympathetic qualities who invites the audience into some degree of identification based on shared characteristics or desires). Alternatively, the subject may be an antihero, a protagonist who invites identification through their centrality in the story but whose actions may at times be repulsive or objectionable. In the middle of the spectrum—hero, antihero, antivillain, villain—sits the chaotic-neutral presence of the trickster, a subject position very seldom offered to the audience.

Evil Villains: Low Identification

Western popular culture villainy might be said to have begun self-consciously at the beginning of the twentieth century with a low degree of ambiguity. The cartoonish, villainous foil to the hero, unavailable to the audience as a point of identification and replete with designs on evil for its own sake, emerges with Dr. Quartz and Dr. Mabuse. Dr. Quartz, the nemesis of America’s version of Sherlock Holmes, Nick Carter, first appeared in Nick Carter Library, no. 13 (1891), two years before Moriarty would appear as Holmes’s chief foe. Quartz faced off against Carter in twenty-seven encounters, including a comic book appearance the third issue of Shadow Comics (1940).⁴⁸ Like later characters such as the Red Skull and the Joker, Dr. Quartz seemingly dies many times, but he always reappears to match wits with Carter another day (lest anyone think that comic storytelling is only type of narrative in which characters die and reappear consistently). Coogan describes Quartz as an amoral hypnotist and vivisectionist who most enjoys slicing up living women [like the real-life Jack the Ripper] and playing against Carter with lives as pawns in his twisted game of chess. In many ways he presages the fictional villains and real serial killers of the twentieth century.⁴⁹ Quartz is not without his weaknesses, one of which is characteristic of many villains: hubris. His egotism, his conceit, his unlimited belief in himself is also his greatest weakness, but even knowing this Nick cannot let his guard down against Doctor Quartz for a moment.⁵⁰ Coogan quotes Carter from New Nick Carter Weekly, no. 692, concerning Quartz: His intelligence is quite the most profound of any person I have ever known…. He is totally without two qualities possessed by other humans … [namely] [m]orality and conscience. The man recognizes no moral responsibility…. Compassion in any form, is a meaningless term.⁵¹

Like Quartz, Dr. Mabuse is a fascinating study in villainy. Created by Norbert Jacques, who published the novel Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler (Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler) in 1921, the character has been the subject of at least five novels and twelve films. These include three films directed by German auteur Fritz Lang: Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922; released in two parts, this four-hour opus is one the greatest silent films ever made); The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933) (banned by the Nazi Party in Germany and not shown there until 1961); and The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse (1960). It was Lang’s films that made Mabuse a villain of notoriety worldwide. Like Lex Luthor or the Kingpin, Dr. Mabuse’s criminal empire is methodically well thought out, leaving little to chance. His is a well-oiled machine, and he has a hand in everything—from stock market manipulation, to political agitation, to gambling, to staging psychoanalysis lectures and hypnotism shows. Like the Joker, Mabuse never seems to run out of henchmen, and he is a master of disguise (always seemingly one step ahead of the law, like Prometheus in the fifth season of Arrow). Mabuse is an intellectual, trained in psychiatry—like the female villains Dr. Harleen Frances Quinzel (Harley Quinn) and Dr. Karla Sofen (Moonstone)—and uses his training to gain advantage over others. For Mabuse, [e]verything in the world gets boring in the long run—except one—the game with people—and their faith—no such thing as luck, only the will to gain power.⁵² He is interested in the force of will and is the Nietzschean superman (Übermensch) in its purest form. When humanity, subjugated by the terror of crime, has been driven insane by fear and horror, and when chaos has become supreme law, then the time will have come for the empire of crime.⁵³ Presaging the Joker and Harley Quinn’s codependent, abusive relationship, Mabuse has a female henchwoman, Carozza, who views him as the greatest man alive and deludes herself into thinking that Mabuse actually has feelings for her.⁵⁴ Viewed with contemporary eyes, Lang’s two earlier films and Jacques’s original novel are chilling prophecies of the rise of fascism and the Nazis. The story of Dr. Mabuse is a story of surveillance that resonates across two world wars, the Cold War, and the War on Terror. As film scholar Tom Gunning argues: Today [Mabuse] does not simply seem a figure from past history, but a compelling contemporary image of terrorism in an age of universal conspiracy and advanced technology.⁵⁵ Mabuse would no doubt feel right at home in our time.

Antivillains and Antiheroes: Identification at a Cost

Comic villains in the Golden Age would largely be characterized according to this unambiguously evil profile, informed to a great degree by these doctors of pulp fiction, who in turn were informed by many of the othered villains of myth, religion, and literature we will discuss in section 2 below. But with the advent of the Silver Age, villain characters would begin to invite meaningful identification opportunities for the audience. Magneto presents an interesting case study of the antivillain. Due to his experiences as a Jewish prisoner in Auschwitz, he fights for mutant rights (and superiority) with a much more militant stance than Professor X, who dreams of peaceful coexistence with the human community. Magneto can be seen as a Malcolm X type, while Xavier can be compared to Martin Luther King Jr. As former X-Men editor Bob Harris argues:

I remember an old saying that every hero is defined by the villain he or she fights—and I think that’s really true when it comes to the X-Men and Magneto. Both want a better place—a better world—for their kind, they just go about it in very different ways. The X-Men hope for the best—where humans and mutants live together in peace. Magneto fears the world and believes that only force can bring change. He doesn’t view himself as evil—and to some minds he isn’t—and that’s what makes him so fascinating and the X-Men’s job so difficult.⁵⁶

Similarly, in the short story Connect the Dots, Adam Troy Castro presents Magneto as

not a demon and … not a villain…. [I]t was his most cherished dream to conquer the world, not out of any personal lust for power, but to make it a safe place for the race of superpowered people … mutants, people born with extraordinary powers…. He’d committed any number of atrocities in pursuit of that goal—he killed, and waged war, ravished countries. It gave him no pleasure, but it was necessary. Homo sapiens had proven it could not be trusted. Homo superior had to fight for survival.⁵⁷

Magneto doesn’t want to kill Professor X or the X-Men, but they stand in his way, so he will fight them. In fact, one of the most common tropes in the villain/hero narrative is that they start out as friends working together in some way. Professor X and Magneto were close friends, but their views on how to achieve social change diverged. Other examples include Doctor Doom/Reed Richards, Batman/Two-Face (or, rather, Bruce Wayne/Harvey Dent), and Mr. Glass (Elijah Price) and David Dunn from M. Night Shyamalan’s film Unbreakable (2000).

A recent documentary, Necessary Evil Super-Villains of DC Comics (2013), suggests that the function and role of the hero and the villain is all simply a matter of perspective. If we reversed focus and considered the story from the point of view of the villain, wouldn’t the hero be the villain and the villain the hero?⁵⁸ The doppelgängers of the Justice League on Earth 3, the Crime Syndicate, are a telling example of this. On their world, doing good is evil and doing bad is good. In the very first superhero feature film released to theaters (that was not a serial), Superman and the Mole Men (1951), the villains of the movie, the mole men, are really victims. The film is an interesting study in mass hysteria, the lynching mentality, and how, due to unfortunate circumstances, the other is often vilified.

The obverse of the (sometimes) sympathetic villain is the antihero, a character type that has emerged, it seems, as our contemporary popular culture’s most compelling. This is, perhaps, because the antihero has blurred the line between heroism and villainy, reflecting the ethical or moral ambiguity that most individuals have found in their own lives. But the antihero is certainly not new. If we consider only comics, Marvel’s first antihero was the Sub-Mariner Prince Namor, created by Bill Everett, who first appeared in Marvel Comics, no. 1 (1939) and proved to be enormously popular. The Sub-Mariner felt wronged by what the surface world had done to his race of underwater Atlanteans (such as killing and poisoning them). Namor would fight against the Human Torch and try to destroy the surface world, and then he would be on the side of humanity fighting the Nazis and the Axis powers. He has a volatile temper and has little respect or regard for surface dwellers. It is precisely this back-and-forth that helped make the Sub-Mariner one of the most popular and fascinating characters during the Golden Age of comics and beyond.⁵⁹

Morally ambiguous antiheroes, such as Breaking Bad’s Walter White and Mad Men’s Don Draper, have enjoyed enormous popularity despite that fact there is little to admire in them—except, perhaps, their ruthless arrogance. Other shows like House of Cards, Prison Break, Orange Is the New Black, The Sopranos, Sons of Anarchy, and Shameless, to name a few, all feature protagonists behaving in ways that fall outside the traditional boundaries of heroism. We have even watched and empathized with Dexter Morgan, a serial killer who kills other serial killers while working as a forensics technician for the Miami-Metro Police Department. Deadpool (2016), an R-rated superhero movie, was a worldwide sensation, making it at the time the second-highest-grossing R-rated film in America (just behind The Passion of the Christ [2004]).⁶⁰ Deadpool’s predecessor, the Punisher, who first appeared in 1974’s The Amazing Spider-Man, no. 129, was at the time a new kind of comics protagonist: a vigilante who killed bad guys (crime lords, gangsters, drug traffickers, and rapists). The Punisher was created at a time when revenge films like Death Wish (August 1974, appearing five months after the Punisher’s February 1974 debut) and Dirty Harry (1971) were enormously popular⁶¹—judge, jury, and slayer all rolled into one. The Punisher has proven to be a popular staple in the Marvel universe. The character appeared in three feature films (1989, 2004, 2008) and proved popular in season two of Netflix’s Daredevil; fans clamored for the character to get his own series (which, in turn, debuted in 2017). Jessica Jones, who, unlike every other character described in the preceding paragraph, is not a white male, is among a new class of female characters increasingly allowed to be deeply flawed as well.

We should perhaps not be surprised. Although there are those supervillains who are pure evil (e.g., the Red Skull), villains are most often rather more complicated. They may do immoral, narcissistic things, but they can also act with dignity and show selflessness. For example, Doctor Doom may be a dictator of his kingdom of Latveria, but he genuinely loves the kingdom’s citizens. They may not have the freedom to do as they please, but they both love and fear Doom. Doom sees himself as a benevolent dictator even though his ultimate goal is world conquest. In The Amazing Spider-Man, no. 36 (2001), Doom sheds a tear over the fall of the Twin Towers on 9/11 (as the Kingpin and Magneto look on): Because even the worst of us … however scarred … are still human. Still feel! Still mourn the random deaths of innocents.⁶²

Today, as the moral authority of Western democracies is questioned on several fronts, even the most sacred of heroes can descend into villainy. Recently, in its Secret Empire storyline, Marvel made no less an icon than Captain America a Nazi/Hydra agent.⁶³ The character who embodied life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness becomes a villain fighting for totalitarian ideals and kills fellow Avenger Black Widow. This could easily be read as a slap in the face to Cap’s Jewish creators Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, the soldiers who fought in World War II, and the victims who died in the Holocaust concentration camps. Although it’s now been revealed that this evil version of Cap was not the real Steve Rogers (who has returned), one could argue that the damage to the character is already done. While Marvel’s Civil War storyline (2006) proved to be immensely popular, Secret Empire is the most unpopular crossover in the company’s seventy-five-plus-year history.⁶⁴ Although, in Civil War, Captain America and Iron Man are at odds, the character keeps his dignity by holding to the rights of the individual. While Marvel has a history of turning its heroes into villains (Daredevil, the Angel, and the Scarlet Witch, among others),⁶⁵ it is possible that Marvel has, at least in the case of Captain America, lost touch with its fan base. Could this episode mark a reactive swing of the pendulum back to traditional hero/villain binaries?

The Trickster: Seduction as Identification

One character trope that will always trouble that binary is the trickster, who occupies a middle ground between the poles of good and evil (or perhaps, more accurately, who is simply groundless and rejects the notion of polarity). While the trickster is often unique and separate from the villain, trickster characters often take antagonistic roles within narrative texts. For example, within Norse mythology, Loki is an archetypal trickster, but he also acts as an antagonist in many Norse myths, comic book storylines, and film adaptations. According to Lewis Hyde, trickster characters and stories have several key characteristics.⁶⁶ First, appetite is the core of the trickster story; a trickster’s appetite can, and often does, take any form (e.g., hunger or lust), and that desire drives the action of the story. A second characteristic of tricksters, according to Hyde, is that they live on the road. A trickster is transient and constantly on the move, in search of ways to satisfy desires. Third, the trickster embodies consciousness coming into being.⁶⁷ Trickster stories show how, without consciousness, we suffer, but with it we can control events; these stories bear witness to the trickster’s awakening to self-awareness and the benefits it brings. In addition to these three major characteristics, Hyde also notes three key themes of trickster stories: (1) chance and accident, (2) divination, and (3) the lucky find. These themes are consistently found within trickster stories and are another way we can identify them. Hyde provides several other notes about tricksters and their stories: tricksters are shameless and can’t keep their mouths shut; trickster stories describe the pure and the impure as well as the opposition between gift and theft; and tricksters reveal, and therefore disrupt, the blind spots of conventional cultural norms. Overall, Hyde argues, tricksters help us see to the heart of things.

Of course, the most prominent trickster in popular culture is the Joker. A changeable being, the Joker invites wildly varying degrees of identification, depending on his mode of deployment. In Alan Moore’s hands, the Joker is abhorrent (even if we can sympathize with his circumstances as a failed comedian stricken with grief); embodied in Heath Ledger’s incredible performance, the Joker becomes, at times, someone we’d rather like to be (at least in a few key moments). In 2015, we published an edited collection entitled The Joker: A Serious Study of the Clown Prince of Crime.⁶⁸ In that volume, the Joker’s impact, provenance, nature, and evolution were discussed at length, so in preparing the current manuscript, which was largely inspired by our experience working on The Joker, we have made the perhaps controversial decision not to spend valuable column inches discussing this most compelling of pop culture bad guys at any length. This is but one of many difficult choices a project like this one presents.

ABOUT THIS VOLUME

While we have herein tried to produce a vital and lasting impression of the supervillain as a rich and significant concept, with many various forms and manifestations, we cannot possibly be comprehensive. There are simply too many examples, and most readers will likely find one of their favorites overlooked in the pages that follow. Among them are characters who have become (or will very soon become) mainstreamed in popular culture: Loki, Thanos, Dormammu, and Darkseid, robust and rich characters all, find only passing mention below. Also passed over is any sustained discussion of Klingons or Khan, Daleks or Disney queens, Sauron or Saruman. Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, and Freddy Krueger all linger restlessly on the sidelines; the Xenomorph and the Predator do battle elsewhere. There will no doubt be criticisms of the choices we’ve made. What we have endeavored to craft might best be called a mosaic rather than a list—fragmented, overlapping, more comprehensible and profound in aggregate, perhaps, than in any one part.

Our volume is influenced by two previous publications: The Superhero Reader and The Comics Studies Reader.⁶⁹ However, unlike those volumes, which almost exclusively feature previously published material, we present a combination of reprinted and original work. Our intent is to put the past and present in conversation, to better understand the future of this literature, of our popular culture, and, if it is not too indulgent to suggest it, of our society. Our volume also differs from the above in that, while the bulk of our tome is dedicated to the study of villainy in comics and sequential art, we have chosen to include discussion of other popular culture forms. In juxtaposing comics villains with witches and henchmen, Voldemort, Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, Godzilla, and Darth Vader, we hope to point out the rich intermedia presence of the supervillain construct as well as some of its chronological development. As Peter Coogan suggests, the supervillain is not unique to the superhero genre, and thus our volume provides a glimpse into supervillainy of all kinds.⁷⁰ We hope that what follows, organized in such a way as to move chronologically—after a sustained consideration of typology and philosophy—with the development of media technologies (myth/literature, motion pictures, and, finally, the comic book and sequential art forms that emerge from it), can be useful for both undergraduate and graduate students, and that scholars can find here a place of departure. Each of the four sections that follow are designed to take the reader on a journey toward greater understanding of the supervillain character type—its long history, its morphology, and its intimate relationship to cultural discourses of right and wrong.⁷¹

It is ultimately the eternal struggle between villain and hero that keeps us coming back to these stories over and over again—whether in comics, films, novels, religious literature, or video games. No matter how many times we see the Joker face off against Batman or Daredevil confront the Kingpin, it never grows stale for us. As Iron Man tells Spider-Man: The Bad Guys knock us over and we get back up on our feet, better than ever and twice as tough. It’s what we do.⁷² At the heart of this collection is a nagging apprehension that it’s the knocking over—rather than the getting back up—that is increasingly attractive to us as readers of popular culture texts.

We begin our journey in Section 1 with a series of pieces that attempt, in their various ways, to build a moral philosophy within which we might account for villainy and, for analytical purposes, parse out its many forms into workable taxonomies. A. G. Holdier, in chapter 1, deepens the discussion only hinted at above about the relationship between heroes, antiheroes, antivillains, and villains and their respective moral identities. In this new piece, Holdier suggests that moral identity is the field on which any talk of ‘hero,’ ‘villain,’ or some mixture of the two is played. Following Holdier’s discussion, we include a previously published essay by Robert Moses Peaslee, who utilizes the work of British cultural historian E. P. Thompson and German sociologist Max Weber to unpack the moral economy of superheroism and, by association, supervillainy. Although not primarily concerned with villain characters, Peaslee’s chapter is included for the contribution it makes to our discussion about moral choices in superhero/villain texts, choices that often lead the subjects of such texts to reject what is